Young people, their stress and the one-way news overload

Do you have a young adult child or grandchild? Then, you might be familiar with the panicked phone call home late at night. Perhaps there’s been a fallout with a housemate or a worry over how they’re going to pay their rent. Maybe they’ll want help unpicking coded criticism from a disappointed boss.

To post-war-hardened elders, Millennials and Gen Z-ers may seem like backbone-free “snowflakes”. But even esteemed social psychologists are now talking about “the anxious generation”.

The statistics seem to bear this out. A report released in January from the charity Mental Health UK revealed that almost a third of employees aged 18 to 24 had been signed off work with stress last year as a result of poor mental health, compared with one in 10 workers aged 45 and above.

Young employees report higher levels of stress than older workers.Credit: iStock

An increasing body of work shows anxiety to be worse among young people, in particular.

“Over the past 20 years, rates [of anxiety, depression and stress] increased by more than two-fold for those aged 16 to 24,” says University College London’s Dr Jen Dykxhoorn, lead author of a 2023 report published in Psychological Medicine. “Understanding what is underlying these patterns is of critical importance.”

Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation and a professor of ethical leadership at the New York University Stern School of Business, where he studies moral emotions and the psychology of morality, wrote his latest book after noticing a rise in mental health issues among young people in the early 2010s.

“The sudden increase in anxiety wasn’t merely due to a heightened willingness to talk about mental illness,” he says. “It indicated that a broader phenomenon is sweeping over the developed Western world.”

So what is causing this lack of resilience among our young people, and how can we help them?

What’s the difference between anxiety and stress?

Dr Linda Blair, a clinical psychologist and an associate fellow of the British Psychological Society, says: “Some people see anxiety and stress as synonymous, but stress doesn’t exist in the DSM (the diagnostic book of psychiatric disorders), and anxiety does.

Anxiety or stress? They’re close, but not the same.Credit: Westend61

“Stress is an actual demand on your brain or body and happens when a person is pushed beyond their usual functioning. Some stress can be healthy. Anxiety, on the other hand, is just a feeling.”

Psychotherapists believe we can learn to moderate our anxiety, defuse it or learn to live with it.

But where has all this “anxiety” come from? Were we talking to our friends and family about “anxiety” when we were young adults ourselves in the 20th century? Surely not.

“Everyone is talking about their feelings a lot more, so there is an argument that we’re just being more open about what has always been,” Blair says. On the other hand, Blair believes “normal” feelings are now being medicalised rather too easily.

“Young people are often looking for a diagnosis or a label,” she says. “So many of my clients say to me: ‘If only I knew I had ADHD or autism’. This might be useful if the child is young and failing at school, and a diagnosis will get them extra practical help. But it’s not the answer. A label does not tell a young person how to cope.”

Mobile phones and social media

Haidt’s 2024 book blames the rise in anxiety on what he terms the “great rewiring of childhood”, particularly because of mobile phones and social media.

“The loss of free play and the rise of continual adult supervision deprived children of the chance to explore, test and expand their limits, build close friendships through shared adventure, and learn how to judge risks for themselves,“ he says.

“After the rise of the phone-based childhood, few parents had the knowledge to protect their children from tech companies that had designed their products to be addictive.”

Information overload: Children are exposed to a constant flood of content. Credit: Istock

Blair believes the modern stress in young people “comes from an overload of information about which we can do nothing. Young people see that the world is burning up and flooding; there are wars,” she says. “They know about it much more because of their phones and social media. Their brains get full, and they don’t have the bandwidth to deal with it.”

Most experts agree that social media is particularly culpable. “It’s a one-way communication and far less healthy than face-to-face encounters,” says Blair.

The pandemic and modern life

Those days of PCR tests and standing 1.5 metres apart away may already feel like ancient history to us, but they have left a mark on our children.

“If you are 20 now, that COVID period was a 10th of your life,” Blair says.

“Children missed an important part of their adolescence, that period where you are searching for identity and asking ‘who do I belong with? How am I unique?’

“In their late teens, young people were deprived of that self-comparison that tells you ‘am I normal?’” she says. “No wonder they are suffering.”

We are over-parenting

“Figures from the [UK] Office of National Statistics tell us that 40 per cent of parents are now only having one child. By 2030, this will be 50 per cent,” Blair says.

“If we have fewer ‘goods’ to take care of for our legacy, we will invest more in each one and put too much on them,” she says. “Sometimes, parents misunderstand what ‘care’ is. Care is to make yourself redundant at the age of 18.”

How do we build resilience in our children?

1. Find creative ways to talk

2. Empower rather than ‘help’ them

3. Ask your child to break down the feeling

4. Use the ‘best friend test’

5. Encourage perspective

6. Help your children take care of themselves

7. Sometimes, just listening is enough

Telegraph UK